Slime moulds, such as Dictyostelium discoideum, have biochemical, physiological and probably developmental features in common with both plants and animals. During development separate Dictyostelium amoebae first aggregate into collecting centers to form small multicellular organisms which, in their slug form, can migrate over the substratum toward light. Eventually a slug culminates to form a f...

BACKGROUND The SF-36 is a very commonly used generic measure of health outcome in osteoarthritis (OA). An important, but frequently overlooked, aspect of validating health outcome measures is to establish if items work in the same way across subgroup of a population. That is, if respondents have the same 'true' level of outcome, does the item give the same score in different subgroups or is it ...

This is the first study of the measurement equivalence of the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System® (PROMIS®) Anxiety short forms in a large ethnically diverse sample. The psychometric properties and differential item functioning (DIF) were examined across different racial/ethnic, educational, age, gender and language groups. METHODS These data are from individuals selecte...

A definitive diagnosis is crucial for management of any oral mucosal disease. Direct immunofluorescence (DIF) is a valuable diagnostic aid for immune-mediated blistering diseases and systemic connective tissue diseases of the skin and the mucosa. This paper gives an overview of the DIF biopsy technique for oral lesions and provides a background for the clinician to optimize the utilization of D...

Differentiation-inducing factor-1 (DIF-1) is a polyketide that induces Dictyostelium amoebae to differentiate as prestalk cells. We performed a global quantitative screen for phosphorylation changes that occur within the first minutes after addition of DIF-1, using a triple-label SILAC approach. This revealed a new world of DIF-1-controlled signaling, with changes in components of the MAPK and ...

Differential item functioning (DIF) occurs when an item is influenced by a variable irrelevant to the construct of interest. Recent investigations of DIF in the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) indicated that several PCL-R items demonstrated significant DIF. These findings spurred the current investigation of DIF in a measure of subclinical psychopathy closely tied to the PCL-R, namely a 4...

Background: Bullous pemphigoid (BP) is the prototype of subepidermal autoimmune bullous dermatoses (SABDs). Direct immunofluorescence on salt split skin substrate (DIF-SS) is one of the methods used to differentiate this group of dermatoses. Objective: We conducted this study in order to delineate the results of DIF-SS in SABD patients. Patients and Methods: Seventeen patients with a BP-like cl...

Airway management in critically ill patients involves the identi cation and management of the potentially dif cult airway in order to avoid untoward complications. This focus on dif cult airway management has traditionally referred to identifying anatomic characteristics of the patient that make either visualizing the glottic opening or placement of the tracheal tube through the vocal cords dif...

The dataflow interchange format (DIF) is a textual language that is geared towards capturing the semantics of graphical design tools for DSP system design. A key objective of DIF is to facilitate technology transfer across dataflow-based DSP design tools by providing a common, extensible semantics for representing coarse-grain dataflow graphs, and recognizing useful sub-classes of dataflow mode...

Differentiation-inducing factor (DIF) defines a group of chlorinated hexaphenones that orchestrate stalk-cell differentiation in the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum (DD). DIF-1 and 3 have also been reported to have tumor inhibiting properties; however, the mechanisms that underlie the effects of these compounds remain poorly defined. Herein, we show that DIF-3 rapidly triggers Ca2+ release ...